Pilots, air traffic controllers, airline personnel and the like routinely monitor meteorological data, reports, and forecasts to assess any potential impacts on the current or anticipated flight plan and the intended destination. However, in situations where the aircraft needs to deviate from the original plan, such as an emergency situation, the information needs to be reanalyzed with respect to the deviation to facilitate continued safe operation. For example, in the case of an emergency landing, ideally a pilot would select an airport within range of the aircraft where landing is least likely to be compromised or complicated by weather or other factors. This requires consideration of numerous pieces of information (e.g., fuel remaining and distance to be traveled, weather radar and/or forecast information, NOTAMs, SIGMETs, PIREPs, and the like), which often is distributed across different displays or instruments, requiring the pilot to mentally piece together all the different information from the different sources. Additionally, in the case where the information for the first airport analyzed discourages landing there, the pilot must repeat the task of aggregating and analyzing the information for one or more additional airports.
In some situations, during pre-flight briefing, a pilot may desire to preselect alternate or diversion airports along the flight plan for potential use en route to the destination. While the foregoing demands of mentally piecing together different information from different sources persist, the pilot must also analyze the information with respect to locations along the flight plan. Additionally, the pilot may be tasked with subdividing the flight plan into segments for which diversion airports need to be defined, which further adds to the pilot's workload. While some existing approaches segment the flight plan in an automated manner, they often fail to account for individual preferences, real-time airport availabilities, and other complex factors, and thus, may result in a suboptimal segmentation of the flight plan that fails to satisfy criteria that are specified or otherwise desired by the pilot or aircraft operator. Accordingly, it is desirable to reduce the mental workload of the pilot segmenting a flight plan and analyzing and selecting alternates en route to a destination.